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Something in the air makes seeds sprout

ONE of our key assumptions about how seeds germinate turns out to be wrong. They don’t absorb water directly from the soil&colon; instead, most of it comes from water vapour in the surrounding air.

The discovery, by Stewart Wuest, a soil scientist with the US Department of Agriculture in Pendleton, Oregon, will be a wake-up call to those gardeners and farmers who believe that seeds germinate and grow best when they are in direct contact with the soil, and that packing down soil on top of seeds is the way to a blooming flower bed or bumper …